QR codes have been a new and unique source of executing mobile marketing campaigns in recent times. Many seem to not only enjoy participating by using them, but have actually begun to look for offers from those with QR codes and may even have begun to ignore those that do not have them at all.

What is a QR Code?

QR is short for quick response and that is exactly the purpose of the QR code. These codes take an element of data from transitory media and sends it to your mobile device. The code will give you details about that business, item, or even discount information on products and services.

QR Codes are more useful than a standard barcode in that they can store a more data and a wider variety of it. QR codes commonly include URL links, text, coordinates and more.

How Does This Benefit Businesses?

Most marketers are well aware that mobile marketing is becoming increasingly more important, almost by the day. No method of advertising could be easier than one that consumers reach out for, instead of being asked to look. QR codes allows those consumers who prefer not to be barraged with overt marketing tactics to choose where they will show interest in a product or service.

There is really no limit to the options that can be embedded in a QR code.

Running a restaurant? – Embed a great recipe, a buy a meal get one free discount, a special on this evenings dessert.

Authors – Add a QR code to the back of your book that enables a consumer to get extra features or hidden endings to your script.

Good health practices – Doctors, or other medically related practices can add good tips and tricks for healthy living to their QR codes, update them every month for innovative creativity in the medical field.

Vital Aesthetics Arrive to QR Coding

Traditionally, QR codes have retained a Rorschach look to them, leaving the responsibility on the advertiser to make sure consumers know whose QR code they are scanning. However, with Snaptags, QR codes and increasing brand awareness have meshed nicely. Snaptags have traded out that whole inkblot look for a code ring that serves the same functional purpose.

Who is Using Snaptags?

Because of the applied branding ability on Snaptags not previously available on QR’s, we can now see who is actively using them.

Although Snaptags no doubt win out in the aesthetic element, there are other issues that can make Snaptags less beneficial than they appear. Many venture because of the supporting copy, Snaptags are not as easily accessible as QR codes. Snaptag stands by the fact that all advertisers would need to do is determine the required supporting copy, but this does lend itself to the inaccessible accusation.

Many current QR code advertisers agree that if a mobile marketing campaign is managed correctly, the aesthetic element of the Snaptags versus traditional QR’s is hardly advantageous.

What is known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday was extended this year to 10 days, with online retailers continuing their discounts throughout the week. What do the online shopping numbers for post-Thanksgiving sales tell us about the state of online shopping?

It’s important to remember that the data is recent and fresh, many analyzers point out. The real numbers will not be available until all the stores report their sales numbers.

Black Friday

226 million shoppers visited stores and shopped online in the 4 days of the Thanksgiving weekend, compared with 212 million a year ago.

The average spending rose as well, to $398.62 per shopper, up from 365.34 last year.

Overall sales climbed 6.6% this year and stood at $11.4 billion. Up nearly $1 billion from last year. It was the largest amount spent in one day since 2007.

“Black Friday has evolved from an early morning shopping activity to a late night entertainment,” says Ellen Davis, spokeswoman at The National Retail Federation. “A lot of people stayed up until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. to go shopping, and then went to bed.”

Not everyone.

Online shopping on Black Friday jumped 26% to $816 million. Compared with $648 million this past year, such a big jump is unprecedented. The year to year growth in 2010 was only 9%.

50 million Americans visited online stores. The most visited were Amazon.com, Wall-Mart, Best Buy, Target and Apple.

Online sales increased much more than the store sales, with stores open at 10PM Thanksgiving day, pepper spraying and bone crushing included.

Cyber Monday:

The strong sales continued into Cyber Monday. This past Monday was crowned ‘the biggest online shopping day ever.’

IBM’s Benchmark research firm published these numbers:

Spending online was up by 33% from last year.

The average spending per customer was $198 per order, up $5 from last year.

People are using tablets and smartphones to shop as well. Traffic from mobile devices was 10.8% of online commerce.

What is even more impressive is the sales using mobile devices were up to 6.6% from all online sales, an increase from 2.3% in 2010.

Experts say the numbers point to the fact that Americans are growing more and more comfortable with online shopping. The mobile shopping increased thanks to companies embracing the tablet, with 5.2% of tablet shoppers making a purchase.

Considering the top 50 online retailers, J.C. Penny, Apple and Symantec performed the best as for availability and response time.

Google Adwords launched new features in September 2011. These new features are geared towards making site clicks and even subscriptions to site newsletters or blogs easier to accomplish. Being able to get signed up to internal site options from the external source of a Google browser could go a long way in increasing traffic for those who utilize these methods.

AdWords Subscribe Option

Adwords now provides an option to allow Google search engine users to subscribe directly from a PPC ad. The option to subscribe to newsletters or email lists can be displayed on top or side ads.

All ads are displayed with “Privacy Info” that lets the viewer know that information shared in the input boxes will be shared with the advertiser.

Mobile Landing Pages

A recent study found that 61% of mobile browsers are not likely to return to a site that does not provide a good mobile experience. In response, Google initiated a shift in their policy that will now reward mobile sites with good optimization. Users with good mobile optimization who promote their sites with Google Adwords will now receive better performance. The ads created will drive traffic at a lower cost if they directly link to your site that is optimized for mobile users.

How Will This Affect Me?

If you are a business owner, whether or not you use Google Adwords, the time to optimize your site for mobile users is now. Even without the use of Google Adwords to promote a site, knowing that over half of mobile browsers will never return to your non-optimized site should be enough to push you into sprucing up your site to accommodate users on mobile devices. Getting rid of flash heavy content is a great step towards optimizing for mobile usage.

How Do I Optimize My Site for Mobile?

Google has offered a few suggestions to help you get your site optimized for mobile usage.

Keep the layout and design simple

Prioritize your content

Use markedly mobile features

Make your site easy to convert

If you want to know how well your site functions on mobile devices, grab your device and load up your site. If it is frustrating for you to navigate, you may want to make the changes required to encourage mobile use of your web pages.

Mobile marketing changed its definition in the early 2000’s when the original meaning, which was marketing on the go, changed into mobile search marketing, which are in essence, marketing techniques carried out over a mobile device.

SMS marketing is an advertising technique that involves the collection of mobile phone numbers to add to a messaging platform database. These numbers are collected so that when a special promotion or offer becomes available, the number list owner can send out a mass message to what they hope will be future repeat customers.

SMS marketing relies on opt-in users due to practices established by the Mobile Marketing Association to help prevent unwanted messaging, similar to the protection offered by the Federal Do Not Call registry. The fact that SMS messages are commonly read in the first four minutes after receipt means that this form of marketing is highly convertible.

Social Networking

Social networks are also playing a huge part in how consumers find desired products and services even while on the go. Studies show that 1/3rd of Facebook users access the social network via mobile devices. The same study showed that 56% of mobile users find local business information via the company’s website, while 55% of them find them through other social networker’s recommendations.

A New Digital World

If we thought SMS marketing was impressive, then came the smartphone. A new world of marketing was then opened in many new forms.

MMS – Multimedia message service

Mobile Web Marketing

In-Game Marketing

Mobile Marketing via QR Codes

User-Controlled Media

Ever-Changing Media

So exactly what is changing about mobile search marketing? For one, it has become infinitely more complex than the simple SMS original formats. Mobile search marketing is unique not only in its format, but also in the way that it approaches the consumer. Traditional forms of marketing can be a combination of intrusive versus elusive.

Intrusive methods include telephone marketing, television advertising, and even door-to-door sales. Although intrusive methods have shown their own positive statistics about effectiveness, many elements such as increased crime rates, new laws and regulations, or increasing costs have made the intrusive forms of marketing much less lucrative in recent years.

Elusive methods are the most effective and can include in-game marketing, user-controlled media, or mobile web marketing. This type of marketing is effective in the sense that the advertisements are usually an ‘in addition to’ or bonuses. For instance, users can play the free game on their phone, or they can purchase the nearby advertisement option to achieve ‘pro’ status on the game. Users can utilize a particular browser and that browser may support and advertise their own series of media, apps, or programs.

Mobile Marketing on the Rise

Although some marketers still argue that mobile queries constitute too little of an overall end-result to make the campaign effort worthwhile, it is a notable fact that Google’s mobile query share has grown over five times in the last couple of years. Mobile search continues to grow at an accelerated rate than traditional search options.

As with any advertising campaign, offline methods should also be considered to garner online conversions. Case studies also show that 37% of consumers admit to using mobile devices to search for more knowledge about a product or service advertised via radio ads, newspaper, or outdoor methods such as billboard advertisement.

There may be no time like the immediate present to gain pioneer advantages and initiate your mobile testing and paid search campaigns right away.

Mobile marketing changed its definition in the early 2000’s when the original meaning, which was marketing on the go, changed into mobile search marketing, which are in essence, marketing techniques carried out over a mobile device.

SMS marketing is an advertising technique that involves the collection of mobile phone numbers to add to a messaging platform database. These numbers are collected so that when a special promotion or offer becomes available, the number list owner can send out a mass message to what they hope will be future repeat customers. SMS marketing relies on opt-in users due to practices established by the Mobile Marketing Association to help prevent unwanted messaging, similar to the protection offered by the Federal Do Not Call registry.

The fact that SMS messages are commonly read in the first four minutes after receipt means that this form of marketing is highly convertible.

A New Digital World

If we thought SMS marketing was impressive, then came the smartphone. A new world of marketing was then opened in many new forms.

MMS – Multimedia message service

Mobile Web Marketing

In-Game Marketing

Mobile Marketing via QR Codes

User-Controlled Media

Ever-Changing Media

So exactly what is changing about mobile search marketing? For one, it has become infinitely more complex than the simple SMS original formats. Mobile search marketing is unique not only in its format, but also in the way that it approaches the consumer. Traditional forms of marketing can be a combination of intrusive versus elusive.

Intrusive methods include telephone marketing, television advertising, and even door-to-door sales. Although intrusive methods have shown their own positive statistics about effectiveness, many elements such as increased crime rates, new laws and regulations, or increasing costs have made the intrusive forms of marketing much less lucrative in recent years.

Elusive methods are the most effective and can include in-game marketing, user-controlled media, or mobile web marketing. This type of marketing is effective in the sense that the advertisements are usually an ‘in addition to’ or bonuses. For instance, users can play the free game on their phone, or they can purchase the nearby advertisement option to achieve ‘pro’ status on the game. Users can utilize a particular browser and that browser may support and advertise their own series of media, apps, or programs.

Although some marketers still argue that mobile queries constitute too little of an overall end-result to make the campaign effort worthwhile, it is a notable fact that Google’s mobile query share has grown over five times in the last couple of years. Mobile search continues to grow at an accelerated rate than traditional search options.

There may be no time like the immediate present to gain pioneer advantages and initiate your mobile testing and paid search campaigns right away.